In the related art, nodes communicating on a computer network cannot see each other's resources such as memories and IO devices. Transparency of resources is not secured.
For example, in an Ethernet (registered trademark) network, access from one node to another is achieved via network hardware such as a network interface card (NIC) provided in a node or via a device driver for the hardware, The related-art approach such as this imposes heavy load and high overhead on the system.
In a computer network such as a multiprocessor system where a plurality of processors are connected, for example, one conceivable approach to address lack transparency of resources between processors is to provide a shared memory accessible by the processors so that the processors can deliver data to each other via the shared memory. In this case, however, processor A cannot directly deliver data to processor B. The shared memory approach inherently requires the step of letting processor A to copy data to the shared memory and the step of letting processor B to read the data from the shared memory for copying. Similarly to the aforementioned approach, there could be a problem of overhead.